2024-08-28 21:37:28
Paris on Sunday commemorated its liberation 80 years ago with a tribute to its inhabitants who resisted four years of Nazi occupation and with calls not to forget the past and to continue fighting “hatred” to avoid “future tragedies.”
On 25 August 1944, the bulk of General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division entered the capital after more than 1,500 days of German occupation and a week of strikes, barricades and street battles led by the resistance.
“It happened 80 years ago. Paris was liberated. This liberation was first and foremost the work of its people,” stressed Parisian Mayor Anne Hidalgo during the official ceremony, urging people to “never forget” the “spirit of resistance” of the capital’s fighters.
Since Monday, tributes have been paid in a city that is preparing to host the Paralympic Games next Wednesday, the torch of which arrived in the capital during the ceremony on Sunday.
“It’s wonderful that 80 years later there is still so much enthusiasm (…) It’s important that we learn everything, all their sacrifice,” Bénédicte de Francqueville, 88, the last surviving daughter of General Leclerc, told AFP.
A parade of vintage military vehicles followed one of the routes that Leclerc’s men took when they entered the south of Paris, in front of thousands of spectators.
“We feel as if we were experiencing what they experienced when the 2nd DB arrived in Paris. It’s extraordinary, it’s extraordinary!” said Véronique Mayer, a member of a military reconstruction association.
Marching bands, concerts, a folk dance and even a ringing of bells took place on Saturday to recall the atmosphere in Paris on 24 August 1944, when the first soldiers of the 2nd DB entered the country on the eve of the Liberation.
“Paris became a celebration, a celebration of freedom for all peoples (…) The streets of Montevideo danced with joy that night, when they learned that Paris had been liberated,” stressed French President Emmanuel Macron.
– «Endless fight against hate» –
The commemoration comes amid a rise in the far right in the European Union and France, and as the war in Ukraine to repel a Russian invasion enters its third year of fighting.
“Giving in to resignation, embracing populism and easy rhetoric (…) is equivalent to accepting future tragedies,” warned Hidalgo. Macron called for continuing “the endless fight against hatred,” a day after the attack on a synagogue.
After acknowledging Allied assistance during the Normandy landing ceremonies in June, with the Liberation of Paris, France turned its attention to the struggle of its resistance fighters and the Free French forces of General Charles de Gaulle.
But the soldiers of the 9th Company of the 2nd DB, known in Spanish as “La Nueve”, were also remembered, because 146 of its 160 men led by Raymond Dronne were Spanish Republicans.
These men, who after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) continued their fight in North Africa, France and Germany, were the first to enter Paris.
But despite her active role in the Liberation, her story was forgotten for decades. After the war, a France marked by the collaboration of the Vichy regime with Nazi Germany sought to present the Liberation of Paris as an act of the French.
“Paris outraged! Paris shattered! Paris martyred! But liberated, liberated by itself, liberated by its people, with the collaboration of the armies of France,” cried de Gaulle on 25 August.
But the descendants of the Spanish exiles continue to fight for the memory of La Nueve and of “all the foreigners who made this victory of freedom and peace possible” in France, in the words of Véronique Salou, of the association 24 août 2024.
tjc/mb
© Agence France-Presse
